Awards were passed out in Park City, Utah, last night as the Sundance Film Festival wound to an end. Several women directors and screenwriters walked away with major awards for what looked to be some incredible films. Here is the list below of the female award winners. (To see who won in the shorts category, click here.)

JILL SOLOWAYU.S. Dramatic Directing Award for Afternoon Delight

Soloway brought her short film Una Hora Por Favora to Sundance in 2012.

Noujaim is also the director of the brilliant documentary film Control Room which screened at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.Sundance page about the film

MELINA POTACo-writer of Circles, which was awarded the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award

Trailer:

KALYANEE MAMWorld Cinema Grand Jury Prize - Documentary for A River Changes CourseThis film is Mam's directorial debut. She is also a cinematographer and was one of two cinematographers on the documentary film Inside Job which screened at Sundance in 2010.

Sundance announced the winners of the Short Film Jury Awards on January 22. With over 8,000 shorts submitted, 65 shorts were chosen to screen and only 14 were candidates in competition. Awards were given out in seven categories: Grand Jury Prize, U.S. Fiction, International Fiction, Non-Fiction, Animation, Acting and the Special Jury. With such a good showing of women filmmakers in the Shorts Program this year (with films in competition), it's disappointing to see the lack of women recipients of Jury Awards.

Finnish filmmaker Jenni Toivoniemi won the Short Film Jury Award: International Fiction for her film The Datewhich she both wrote and directed (the only woman filmmaker awarded). She's a cofounder of the production company Tuffi Films in Helsinki, Finland. The awards were very American, with four of the total seven awards being handed out to films from the U.S.A.; the other countries represented were Finland (for Toivoniemi), Poland, and Ireland. (See the entire list of Short Film Jury Award winners here.)

Still from Jenni Toivoniemi's "The Date," a Sundance Short Film Jury Award winner (International Fiction)

The Sundance Film Festival will be live streaming its awards ceremony tonight from Park City, Utah. Be sure to tune in online at 7pm mountain time / 9pm eastern to watch!

"[I]t's not enough for a festival that's so proud of its work promoting new voices, and for independent film in general, to simply be better than studio competitors. You can't be proud when the bar is so low."

"[W]omen were most likely to be producers across all behind-the-camera positions."

Findings from the Sundance Institute and Women In Film study:Findings include:

Of U.S. films selected for the Sundance Film Festival from 2002-2012, 29.8% of filmmakers(directors, writers, producers, cinematographers and editors) were female.

Across all behind-the-camera positions, females were most likely to be producers. As the prestige ofthe producing post increased, the percentage of female participation decreased. This trend was observedin both narrative and documentary filmmaking. Fewer than one third of all narrative producers but justover 40% of associate producers were female. In documentaries, 42.5% of producers and 59.5% ofassociate producers were female.

When compared to films directed by males, those directed by females feature more womenfilmmakers behind the camera (writers, producers, cinematographers, editors). This is true in bothnarratives (21% increase) and documentaries (24% increase).

Females were half as likely to be directors of narrative films than documentaries (16.9% vs. 34.5%).

Female directors of Sundance Film Festival films exceed those of the top 100 box office films. 23.9%of directors at the Sundance Film Festival from 2002-2012 were female, compared to 4.4% of directorsacross the top 100 box office films each year from 2002 to 2012 that were female.

41.5% of the female directors across 1,100 top-grossing movies of the past ten years had been supported by Sundance Institute.

Five major areas were identified as hampering women’s career development in film:

An unsettling but important film about when a system becomes more important than a person's life. Seven minutes without dialogue. The most unsettling aspect of the film is that it could be absolutely true.

The Los Angeles Times calls Jenifer Malmqvist's film On Suffocation a "surreal study in a pristine prison inside an unnamed Islamic state where being gay comes with lethal consequences." Malmqvist's film is in the International Narrative category of the Sundance Film Festival Shorts Program this year, and is a work sponsored by the Swedish Film Institute. Sundance describes it as a "dialogue-free film about an execution [that] describes what happens when the system becomes more important than human life."

"This film was born out of equal parts [of] love and anger. I am so damn glad that it will premiere in Sundance because it's an important film and I hope it [will be seen] widely. The production was a fast pace with a wonderful team and absolutely fabulous actor. My hope is that the audience is reminded of the need to treat each other with humility" - Jenifer Malmqvist

I'm disappointed I couldn't secure an interview with Jenifer for this Sundance Series (but there might be hope yet!), especially as the premise of this film resonates with me, and treats a subject that I think is tragically ignored within the larger conversations we have -- in the U.S. especially -- about the practice of imprisonment, treatment of prisoners, LGBT rights, foreign policy and "winning hearts and minds" when it comes to so-called "nation-building" within Islamic countries.

Jenifer's film screens as part of Shorts Program 4 tonight as well as tomorrow, January 23 and January 26. Refer to the schedule here and read more about Jenifer's film in the Sundance Festival Guide.

About the FilmmakerWriter/director Jenifer Malmqvist’s short films have been screened and awarded at festivals around the world. Both Peace Talk (2007) and Birthday (2010) have previously screened at the Sundance Film Festival. A graduate of the film directing program at the Polish National Film School in Lodz, Malmqvist was awarded a scholarship in memory of the Swedish film director Bo Widerberg in 2009. She is currently working on a short documentary and the script for her first fiction feature film.